turboSnail

Good catch! Fixed it now. I already knew I swipe too fast. Should spend more time reading before posting. 😆

The Internet as a whole isn’t the problem. Specific sites are. Steer clear from those sites, and you’ll be just fine. Take notice of which sites and services result in negative emotions, and find alternatives to those places.

What doesn’t kill you, will probably maim you for life. Although there is a slim chance it will make you stronger, but don’t count on it. Most likely, several internal organs will wither, and you’ll get very familiar with kidney dialysis treatment.

If you need a handful of plugins to make a site tolerable, there’s probably something terribly wrong with that place. We can keep on patching it with an ever growing list of plugins, but is it really worth it.

Long ago, many people said they would move to Canada. I wonder if they did, though.

And pigeons are flying rats.

Always remember, distrohopping is allowed. Your first distribution doesn’t have to stray with you forever. It can, but doesn’t have to. If you hear about a cool new distro, feel free to try it out.

One option is to use a a dumpster browser for all the corpo trash that requires JavaScript. Just disable JS on all the good browsers and carry on as usual. If a site doesn’t work there, throw it into the dumpster.

It also depends on how do you use that mailbox for. In my case, Gmail doesn’t get to see anything related to my professional life. I have another email provider for more serious conversations like that. For the most part, Gmail gets to see a bunch of mailing list junk I never subscribed to. I also use Gmail to logging into various services I don’t really care that much about. Nothing important, nothing serious. If it involves money in any way, Gmail doesn’t get to read those communications.

However, I am tempted to move all my serious email communications to a more serious paid service. There might be immediate practical benefits too. I could set up a dedicated email address for each creepy company and that way I would find out which one sold my data to spammers.

If you just Google something like “health effects of hibiscus,” you’ll find a mixture of information too. Most people probably can’t tell which claims are well researched and which ones aren’t.

You’ll be left with a mixed bag, but reading all that takes more time than it takes to read an equally flawed summary you get from a gas powered AI. From a convenience perspective, I can understand why some people might prefer an LLM. From a reliability perspective, I can’t favour either option. Regardless, the difference in environmental impact should be clear to everyone.

I think it really depends on the type of refugee we’re talking about here.

If they’re interested in tinkering, the starting point doesn’t really matter that much. Just let the refugee know that distrohopping is allowed. If you hear that some new distro has an awesome feature, give it a go.

If we’re talking about a person who hates tinkering and tweaking, the first distro suddenly begins to matter a lot more. That’s the distro they will be stuck with for several years, so Mint is definitely a solid option. Actually, most distributions that are Debian or Ubuntu based should be fine.

I already use several Firefox forks for different purposes, and all of them are reasonably resistant to fingerprinting. I also have a special container for all the corpo trash I have to deal with. When I click a random news articles on Lemmy, those sites are opened in a different container and their creepy cookies get deleted as soon as I close the tab.

I’m doing all of this out of of philosophical reasons. It’s also pretty easy to set up, and there are hardly any downsides. Disabling java script is something I have tried too, but it did come with all sorts of severe downsides, so that’s where I had to draw the line.

Regardless, I still find the idea of a privacy respecting email appealing. Philosophical reasons again… Recently, I also made a quick and dirty risk assessment about the potential risks, and I still didn’t see an urgent need to mitigate them. The practical side of it still requires a bit more reading before I can justify an ongoing expense like this. Naturally, the email provider would have to be EU based.

Thanks for the explanation.
I’m only vaguely aware of the concept of an atomic distribution, so there’s a lot to learn. I guess it’s about time I sacrificed my spare laptop to silverblue.

When it comes to recommending a distribution to a newbie, I have mixed feelings about atomic distributions. If the newbie in question just wants to leave the OS alone and focus on gaming, Bazzite sounds like the best option.

On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.

I think it’s pretty simple to understand if the system just pulls packages from the repos and downloads what needs to be updated. If you add flatpaks and appimages to the mix, it just adds another layer of confusion. Totally fine for your second distro though. After all, getting to experience new and interesting ways to do things is the joy of distrohopping.

And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake. Those newbies who want to know how these things work may find an atomic distro a bit overwhelming.

But do you really need to understand any of that to get started? Do you think it’s enough for most newbies to just install a few flatpaks to get the apps you need? Do you think they would need to involve rpm-ostree within the first year?

No native package manager? How does Bazzite manage packages then?

Well, that sounds oddly familiar. Isn’t that pretty much what OVRA did in Italy and NKVD did in the USSR. Actually, this is really beginning to sound a lot like a rerun of the entire 1930s.

The Last Airbender was awful, but enjoyable. You just need to forget about the anime series for a while, and enjoy the movie as it is. It’s not meant to be a cult classic or anything reviewers would praise. Brains off, action on. That’s all there’s to it. Watch it once, enjoy your two hours and never tell anyone you actually had a good time unless you want to start a fight.

Exactly. It’s one of those “I know it when I see it” type of things rather than a solid definition. Like Froot Loops definitely are UPF, but what about a salad in a plastic box? Sure, it’s been through a factory where it got chopped, mixed and packaged. That’s industrial scale food processing too, right?

Care to elaborate?
I know many people who use Teams at work, and they aren’t complaining. Quite the opposite actually. Various announcements are no longer emails since they have been migrated to relevant Teams channels. This means that it’s way faster to scroll past announcements that are not particularly relevant to your work, and none of them clog up your inbox any more.

The only real problem is CPU and RAM usage, but as long as your IT department is reasonably funded, that’s not a problem either.

That works too. I’ve had a pihole for years, and that was great as long as you’re on wifi. Also, it required a little bit of admin work, which I usually forgot to do. On the other hand, it’s really good if you want to know exactly what’s going on. Recently, I came to realize, I don’t really mind outsourcing this service to the pros.

If you’re scrolling while waiting on a bus stop or while sitting on a train, you need to use something else. I guess you could connect to your pi from anywhere, maybe even set up your VPN and all that. I’m sure there’s a away around that problem, but that would obviously require some reading, setting up, tinkering and admin work. Technically doable, but I just didn’t feel like doing all that. I’m definitely not an IT pro, which means that I end up screwing things up in hilarious ways all the time.

Also, opening up my pi to the whole internet is a scary thought. If I set up my pi like that, that would definitely require quite a bit of reading. That’s what ultimately lead me to pay for this service.

NextDNS.
This way, you can very easily filter out most of the ads on your mobile devices.

If you want to, you can also play this game on hard mode, and start blocking telemetry more aggressively. It can be done, but various apps will stop working. When that happens, you’ll unlock a fun new mini game: DNS White List Tuning.